Since Your Humble Blogger got provoked by Benjamin Rosenbaum into writing acres of drivel (unlike the usual acres of drivel off my own bat), there has been a good deal of fascinating discussion in various corners about what I perhaps wrongly called core stories. As I said here, I think religion is the core story, the story we cling to that provides the frame for everything else. I tried to give a few examples of what I mean, but my fondness for brevity (no, stop laughing, OK, you, stop it, you know what I mean) led me to attempt to distill these stories into one-sentence emblems of themselves. Which is, I think, a tremendously useful and powerful task, as I tried to explain, but on the other hand, it’s also a tremendously wasteful and distracting one. As a result, some of the conversation about “core stories” (including, bye-the-bye, a lovely shiur over at the Chrononautic Log) has gone to my mind a trifle astray. When I talk about core stories, I really am talking about stories, and when I say that my core story is that we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, I am using ritual language to tell, in brief, the whole story of the Exodus from Egypt, plagues and parting seas and the miraculous staff and Miriam singing on the far shore. And, yes, that sentence does highlight (I almost wrote it privileges) some aspects of the story over others, which is how I like it, and that’s where the useful and powerful comes in, don’t you know.
Another problem with the discussion was pointed out, astutely, by Gentle Reader Dan P, who observed that the whole thing had become, or had even started as, a bit of a pissing contest between a bunch of guys, with the clear if unintended consequence of making it effectively impossible to hear any female core stories. This is, in part, simply a function of Mr. Duncan, Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Moles, Mr. Hartman, and Mr. HumbleBlogger being guys, for which decision we ought not be penalized. On the other hand, this sort of thing happens conspicuously often, and is one of those things that should really convince us of the evil of the patriarchy; whether we intended to or not, we engaged in actions that blinded us to what the universe is like to women, who are different one to another as well as to men (who are different one to another our own poor selves), and if there’s anything that makes the world interesting and fun, that is it.
Anyway, Mr. Percival asked some of his acquaintance to Tell Me a Story, which they did, and it has been fascinating. My primary observation was that several brought up stories that they had once had as frames through which to see the world, but later discovered were distorting lenses or entirely opaque. Prince Charming came up, as did a story described as That Girl/Mary Tyler Moore, which is the story of a woman who finds both intellectual fulfillment and close friendship in the workplace. It led me to wonder to what extent women, rather than men, would be likely to bring up busted core stories. I have my own busted core stories (the Self-Destructive Genius, the confirmed Bachelor, the Wise Uncle), but in my arrogant patriarchal (and to some extent temperamentally Conservative) way, it wouldn’t occur to me to start the conversation with those. No, I would start, I did start, with what I think the world really is like.
So. As I didn’t specifically ask my Gentle Readers for their core stories, I will do so now. What stories do you think you have escaped from? What stories do you want to escape from, but have trouble doing so? What stories do you not want to escape from at all?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
“and they lived happily ever after.” That’s the one I do not want to escape from at all. No matter how bleak the day, no matter how insane the world around us, this is now my Truth and my Guide, my Touchstone and my Driving Force. “and they lived happily ever after” is a frame for so many stories, a leading-in to the unknown, a hint and gloss of that which came before, and remarkably easy and remarkably hard at the same time. “and they lived happily ever after” is how I define myself, how I define us, and how I want to be remembered.
“When I am twenty-eight, life will be perfect.” Now I’m 36, and life was far from perfect when I was 28. BUT when I was 10, and decided on 28 as the perfect age, 28 meant “driving, voting, drinking, financial freedom, and freedom from responsibilities.” I had that combination of legal rights and freedoms at 28, but I was far from perfect.
I just remembered my REAL core story, which I’ll post here and then bounce back over to Dan P’s again to post it there…
“I’m just as close to perfect as to dying.”
peace
Matt
Ah, it took me a couple of repetitions to get it completely through my head. You don’t just mean stories stories, you mean stories stories.
Strangely, now that I’ve got the idea, it doesn’t take any time at all to figure out mine:
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.
It would be nice to say that I’m one of the titular Ones, but I’m afraid I’m firmly rooted in the common citizenry. I have doubts about whether it is (in the complete sense) possible to Walk Away, but the story remains the clearest sense I have of how the people-world works.
As for core stories–you’ve mentioned this before with reference to the Best Non-Reader (who really reads quite well now)–I think one of the best to instill is:
People are different from one another and that is what makes the world interesting and fun.
We’ve worked quite hard to make that a key value and I hope that her core story is grounded in that one. It’s way better than “People are different from one another and that’s why you should live in a gated community”.
As for me–I wish I believed harder in the story that you can reinvent yourself. In a time of transition, it’d be nice to feel like it was really true. But I definitely went to college with the plan to reinvent myself into someone who was less geeky, more popular and it was not long before I reverted to type. My core is somewhere between “reinvent yourself” and “the leopard cannot change his spots”, I guess.
This may not be the sort of story you mean, but with the recent death of my grandmother I’ve been talking to my dad some about her story, “you work really hard because that’s what you do”, and my dad’s sometime feelings of inadequacy in trying to live up to that. Which is strange for me given my major feelings of inadequacy not living up to my dad. He still accepts that story; I’m not sure I do – it doesn’t motivate me and I fall far short of it anyways. Maybe this is a story my own hypothetical kids would be better off without? The alternative my mom offered me, “Don’t miss anything!”, feels sort of shallow somehow. These days I am often stuck in “Nothing Ever Happens On My Block” which is a dull story for the protagonist.
I think one of my busted core stories is “you can accomplish anything you put your mind to if you just work hard enough,” which is often slightly rephrased as “you can be anything you want when you grow up.”
Oddly, I think this is a core story that, at least in the latter quarter of the 20th and the early 21st centuries, is most often told to girls.
And I certainly understand why it’s taught to girls (and boys), and in theory at least, it’s a core story that I would want to teach to my (as yet hypothetical) daughter (or son). But it certainly hasn’t been proven true in my life, or in the lives of many people (mostly women? I’m not sure) I’ve known, and the experience of its being proven not true has been … um … challenging … and I can’t help but feel somewhat hypocritical in passing it along.